Think you don’t need to hire a proofreading service to make sure that your copy is in tip-top shape? The Stickler says: think again! Even the most meticulous of authors who have spent hours and hours combing through their work spellchecking, fact checking, and format checking often make these overlooked errors that proofreading services are paid to ensure don’t happen:
1. Believing Spell Check Is the Be All and End All in Proofreading
The biggest mistake that any author can make is to rely heavily on the spell and grammar check that came with their word processing software to correct every spelling mistake in their paper. It’ll often catch the basics, fixing up obviously transposed letters (i.e. “teh” for “the”) and adding in punctuation where necessary. But it will never completely and accurately correct homonyms (i.e. “you’re” and “your”), correct tenses (i.e. “Mom cook chicken for dinner”), or illogical word placement.
2. Sentences That Include Doubled or Missing Words
Another common error that editing companies often come across are doubled and/or missing words. After reading, rereading, rewriting, and re-rereading your work, it’s easy for authors to quickly glaze over paragraphs of work, thus often missing any words that they’ve unnecessarily doubled up, or any words that may be missing (i.e. “We drove the store” instead of “We drove to the store”).
3. Neglecting to Spot Run-on and Fragmented Sentences
It’s easier than many authors think to end up with one or more run-on sentence or sentence fragment in a piece of work. Usually any good freelance editing company will check and double check every single sentence that you’ve written to ensure that it has a subject, a verb, and a complete thought that’s been expressed through your writing, while tidying up any fragments and run-ons.
4. Improper Formatting
You may be surprised by just how many authors completely neglect to follow the formatting instructions that they’ve been instructed to follow. Unfortunately, doing so can immediately disqualify any paper, something which is an absolute blow to anyone who has spent months upon months researching and writing a thought-provoking thesis. It also angers the company bosses and marketing teams if an employee doesn’t follow the correct style in a blog for example.
Margin sizes, type face, and font size are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to formatting for most papers. Unless you’re prepared to spend at least a couple of hours familiarizing yourself with your current word processing software and then trusting yourself to format your paper correctly, strongly consider hiring a freelance copy editing service to at least check that everything is done properly.
5. Lack of Accuracy
This isn’t to say that you haven’t done your research properly; chances are that you certainly have. But improperly cited information provided in your paper will render your paper “inaccurate,” and so that imperative piece of information that may be the backbone to your entire thesis (or at least help support your argument) won’t be considered. A proofreading service will look at every single piece of information that you provide in your paper (i.e. dollar amounts, dates, author names from cited studies, etc.) and make sure that each and every fact that you provide is accurate and properly cited according to the required citation guide or style.
These are just five common overlooked errors that proofreading services are paid to ensure don’t happen—obviously many more come to the forefront when a piece of work gets looked at. For that reason, the Stickler highly recommends having a second pair of eyes edit and proofread your work before you ever publish or submit it.
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